Bettors will toss down millions of dollars on the Preakness on Saturday, but there will be even more gambling on Monday and Tuesday in Timonium as established owners or aspiring ones wager big bucks on next year’s three-year-olds.
It’s all part of the big dream machine of thoroughbred horse racing: Fasig-Tipton’s annual spring auction of two-year-olds in training at the Maryland State Fairgrounds.
And that’s no smoke about dreams.
Just two years ago this month, two horsemen, Ramiro Restrepo and Gustavo Delgado Jr., went to the Timonium auction and bid $290,000 for a Kentucky-bred chestnut colt that impressed them by showing some pep after a hard workout. That horse, later named Mage, won last year’s Kentucky Derby, then finished third in the Preakness.
So that’s why people with the bug and the bucks go to Timonium.
Fasig-Tipton’s annual Midlantic May sale is a big deal, one of the biggest such sales in the country. Over a week’s time, the sale draws a highly specialized crowd – people who breed, buy, sell and train race horses – from all over the country. People in the trade are well aware of the annual two-day sale’s proximity to the Preakness on the national racing calendar. In fact, the auction is scheduled to take advantage of so many owners and trainers being in Maryland for the big stakes race at Pimlico.
“Timing is everything,” says Paget Bennett, the Fasig-Tipton sales director in Timonium.
While the Midlantic May sale is best known among those in the industry, sometimes news from the auction breaks into the mainstream, as it did in 2022, when a bay colt brought $3.55 million. That broke the Maryland record for a thoroughbred sold at public auction. The previous record had been set in 2019, when a filly sold for $1.8 million. That horse, later named Gamine, had major stakes wins in 2020 and 2021.
Bennett says a seven-figure bid is not unusual. “I think we’ve had at least one seven-figure horse each year for close to 10 years,” she says.
Next week’s bidding will likely lead to more than $30 million being spent on colts and fillies born in 2022 in Kentucky, New York, Maryland, Florida and several other states. This year, more than 500 two-year-olds are stabled at Timonium, and each of them gets a few minutes – actually, only seconds – to show their stuff.
Think of it as the NFL combine for race horses.
In the week prior to the auction, the two-year-olds get under tack and a rider takes them on the track’s backstretch, first walking, then cantering, then galloping into the final turn, then picking up speed and sprinting flat out over the last eighth of a mile. That short trip is timed and the results posted on the screen on the Timonium infield.
Most of the horses I watched Thursday morning covered the eighth in 10 seconds flat, while some hit the finish line in 10.1 or 10.2 seconds. (Hejazi, the horse that sold for $3.55 million in 2022, ran the distance in 9.4 seconds. It has since had nine races, finishing in the money seven times. Bob Baffert is Hejazi’s trainer.)
It’s a beautiful thing, with each horse breezing solo down the stretch and getting a moment to impress the scouts watching from the grandstand or via Fasig-Tipton’s video stream.
The equine combine takes place over a couple of days before the Preakness. The “draft” happens when the bidding starts on Monday.
Thursday morning broke sunny and warm, and the Timonium infield looked like fresh-cut pastureland, with an old hay truck parked just past the finish line. The American, Maryland and Fasig-Tipton company flags stretched out to the south in a breeze that helped dry the track after a couple of days of rain. Scouts settled into the grandstand with field glasses and laptops, then, around 10 a.m., an announcer started calling out each horse that came onto the track.
At this point in life – or for the purposes of the auction – the horses do not have names. They are known by their “hip” number – that is, the number they’re assigned for the auction. (Numbers are placed on each horse’s hip before they enter the auction circle.) And their parents are listed in the Fasig-Tipton catalog.
I watched more than 20 horses before departing. Did any one of them stand out? Could I recommend one based on its sire and dam, or how it performed in its 1/8th-mile breeze? No. I am too romantic a railbird and a lousy handicapper. To me, they all looked exquisite, coming down the Timonium stretch, sprinting past the finish line, all of them headed for certain glory.
